Mechanics of Advanced Materials

Our principal interests lie in understanding interesting and exciting phenomena in solid mechanics and multi-physics material behavior. The general procedure followed in our work has been; (i) Conduct experiments to obtain material behavior over a range of environmental conditions. (ii) Develop physics based constitutive theories to capture that material behavior. (iii) Develop and implement numerical procedures for use in finite element simulations. (iv) And lastly validate the constitutive theory and its numerical implementation in some exciting and representative applications.

The PI, Shawn Chester, is currently a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Shawn was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Prior to that he obtained his PhD in solid mechanics from the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, and obtained both his BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from NJIT.